


Into the Skin

by briaeveridian



Series: A Mythology We Weave [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Ben POV, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, One Shot, One True Pairing, Open Ending, Supernatural Elements, and it kind of hurts, and more hopefully, basically a long poem, it's definitely darker than what i usually write, just a warning, magic and storms and torment, not that graphically violent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:48:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25865413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briaeveridian/pseuds/briaeveridian
Summary: To those who are banished and those who are cursed,Finding a path that is newly birthed.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: A Mythology We Weave [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918027
Comments: 10
Kudos: 7
Collections: The Sacred Texts [ 2020 ]





	Into the Skin

**Author's Note:**

> I'm excited and honored that this was selected to be included in The Sacred Texts [ 2020 ]!
> 
> I read Dinkerinos' Man of Wind and Sea a couple of months ago and it stuck with me. Intensely. It dug into my brain. So that beautiful story partially inspired this. Another inspiration was the movie Under the Skin (I haven't seen it in a while but the ambiance of it is linked).

He is banished to the mountains, where stone and soot and cold corrupt. _It is the way_ , they said. _You cannot be redeemed_.

Outcast as a wicked thing, he is made of regret. A disappointment absolute rules his shattered mind. It sings into his ears and presses against his mouth, invading and souring all in its reach. He is simply pre-carcass, waiting to rot, unwanted amongst the crevices and the obsidian.

This is the place where loneliness is a feud between body and soul. And he must wage it, endlessly and bitterly. There is no room to give up. If he is to walk this path, he will not turn away. These eyes will go visionless before he averts his gaze.

The village called him shadowed, perilous, foul. He could not take steps to show them otherwise, for when one sets out to find evidence to support a closed mind, it is easy enough to succeed. 

And no one spoke for his side. As cutting as that was, reality held no surprise. It crystallized his understanding, making it solid and clear. Cutting and cold. Algidity in shape and weight.

The mountain offers no comfort. Only hardened edges and precipitous drops. It threatens every day to overtake him. And he yields often but does not break. Still, the tear ravines of his face continue to deepen, to be sculpted by water escaped through clenched lids. How much sorrow can one person ingest before the threads of life fall away?

Hunger takes up too much space. Sadness callouses his form. He is bound and excavated, a vacancy of life inside and out. There is never enough rumination to explain the folds of existence, the patterns of betrayal and spite.

 _Hear into the void_ , she whispers. _See into the ether. Sense all that will destroy you. It is within me._

He is cursed. It is a timeless curse of weather and agony, withering the soul from within and battering the form from without. He feels the crash and splinter deeply, each breath a blunder.

And yet, there is a comfort. For she brings a beauty that ravages. But a beauty nonetheless. 

The mountain is her epicenter, thrashed by thunderrain and shrieks of stormwind. It is torrential in its assault and unresponsive in its observance. It is relentless in its atrocities. The storm roots and marauds, a meticulous disequilibrium orchestrated at random.

Within and around he is chained. But no matter the vertigo, he finds her amongst it all. For he knows her. After all this time, she is the sole of what he knows.

Hers is a wind that erodes hungrily. It picks at him, dislodging his flakes and crumbs, taking him away with her each time, bit by bloody bit. She is consuming him, deliberate and slow. 

She exudes a danger that preserves, at least.

He trembles at her touch and flays himself open. _I am yours, I am yours_ , he murmurs to the pitted sky.

For though she wants to erase him, he yearns for her. A distillation of violence inward and beratement of all that remains cannot counter this truth. 

His truth is this. No other has spent untold hours contemplating him, looking at him, orbiting him. Never has another observed him diligently, a thing to study and understand. Everyone before closed him as a book already read, words categorized as _known_. A reality collapsed and therefore slain.

If known, he is dismissed, and no new actions can shift that which has been finalized. Why continue to break against the rocks, pounding out one’s own essence into seafoam? That would be an unconditional surrender of self.

Of course, her dedication to him is a goal of systematic destruction. He is to be obliterated until there remains nothing to even bury. To bury would mean a place to remember.

Plainly, he has no protections or defenses. Curiously, he is still strong. Resilient against her hurricane and lightning. He resists her to remain with her. 

Her focus inherently bestows worthiness he has never felt. She is rarely far away, haunting him with her obsession. That alone is nourishment. Though by now he is but a crumbling entity, a representation of entropy in motion.

She knows his truth, has tasted it. But she doesn’t acknowledge it. It is impossible for her to reciprocate, to send an exchange, to betray her arbiters. Her duty is annihilation. But still, she hesitates.

When she leaves him, it is true pungent devastation. There is only emptiness beyond her, only a still rank air that coils within his calcifying lungs. Only then do fatal falls draw consideration, when hopelessness finds residence in all of his aching pores. When the deluge of rust overcomes him.

Here is when he gasps for her. The reliable lash of her freshwater tongue. The drowning of her downpour. _Please, return to me. There is nothing without you. You are all, my world entire._ The words are choked and lost within the cave contours. 

And yet, somehow, she always hears, always returns.

His life has been a building up to this precipice. A finite and concentrated point. Trying to be illuminated by light, standing in it with purpose, but failing each time to claim the space. Or so everyone declared, shouted, cajoled. His rejection was a slow-motion riptide, each wave crushing the sand beneath minutely further.

The saltwater wounds always sting. Woven into him, these stories of pain bring meaning to each wound and scar. They coil within his belly as he contorts, cowers as a child, clutching his concave body. This fraying figure which has known so little but torment and chill. 

Had he not once ached for softness, for a warmth that could reach every end of finger and toe? A warmth that offered the heart hearth wood to burn.

That was a time of weakness, he knew. Too idealistic, too simple. The world harms those who want the curves, who crave the delicate. So he succumbed to malice and scorn, taking the burdens unto himself, thinking them the only things he would ever be given.

Perhaps there was a time when cruelty ebbed and kindness flowed to surround him. Perhaps at the start of it all, but such things are lost to the tumult. Smeared from memory, discrete and precise.

Herein lies the infinity of it; that she clings to him, as well. He has become a constant, a point of gravity to swirl around, twisting and rippling. 

The dark stone of her core has found itself less stilted, more pliable. It has become a thing of feeling once again. An erratic flicker within its dirtied angles and plains.

To eradicate him would now mean a removal of herself, a displacement most inhuman. Is she even human? She secretly dreads that her claims to mortality have already been relinquished.

Between them a chasm remains. Depths of untold lengths that howl into the storm. It threatens to engulf both and will not be beaten. It is an unspace that devours the winged hopes that pass above.

Solitary ones who migrate the vast expanse of isolation cannot but fall in. 

The exterior claimed these two, whose power is a tool, a weapon, either to be selfishly used or selfishly feared. Neither controls the world that springs up around them. Yet the internal bolsters them, a melody of destruction and re-emergence as old as time.

Through day or eon, neither can tell. Both defy, in their own weary way. He to crave her, the perpetrator of his own disassembling. She to desire him, the object of meticulous scorn. Each to wonder how this could become their duality.

And she is the one to fight against character, to reject her ageless obligation.

The moment unfolds before him, a mess of shock and confusion.

For she is solid and kneeling before him, a rush of physicality. 

She looks at him, arms streaming in the fervent gusts. Hair a rush of the sea, eyes dark as charcoal clouds. He cowers in body but leaps in soul, rushing toward her with placating eyes.

The molecules themselves rumble their complaints, unable to sustain cohesion around her.

_Are you a conjurer? Have you seen my mind?_

Her silence resounds and sparks. She is holding his filthy hands, limbs, torso. She is taking him into her, a gentle containing of his flailing parts. 

Still stunned supplicant fingertips move to touch her, the first time she is _here, tactile_. Simultaneously, her shadow-smeared brilliance entrances and tarnishes. It is no more damage than he has survived before. In truth, it is a gift.

_You are more than they say. You are more than is known. I have known you._

The tortured mind knows not how to respond. It writhes, feeling the glimpse of mercy and solace. Is this finally release or another trick, one more ominous than the rest? For to see the hint of light again will exaggerate the darkness only further. And breath will become acrid. Blood will become poison. Bone will become dust.

She knows that the myth of him will be forever smoke-stained and frightening. He was a battle they won, their glory his demise. The world forsook him. Only she deserves him now.

His lips became hers and he is relinquished of a weight. Unburdened all at once and brought into a sun rising sky. The sheer magnitude of it shakes him.

_I love you and the ground you have tread. I love you and the wind you have taken into your lungs. I love you and the ugly world that your eyes have been forced to look upon._

A shudder rakes through him, clawing at atrophied muscles, jolting the trickling bloodstream. 

_It has all been worth it. To have this moment. To have your warmth enshroud me._

His eyes pour into hers and she is breathless, tangled up in him and her heartstone beats and her fingers trace his face. Compulsive, possessive.

 _You are mine and into the skin I will take you._  


She drags him from the depths and fully unearths him. Therein he is exquisite, a sight holy and pristine.

He kisses her again, hungry for impact. With force both profound and terrifying, they dissolve into the quickening storm.

**Author's Note:**

> ✨Thank you for reading ✨ 
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://briaeveridian.tumblr.com/) where my SW obsession lives aggressively.


End file.
